Court blocks MPAA's 'bulldozer strategy'

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Attempts by the Motion Picture Association of America to sue
hundreds of people in the US whom they accused of usinf
file-sharing networks have met with opposition from the courts, the
Electronic Frontier Foundation says in a statement.

Last week, the MPAA sued groups of "Does" identified by IP
address and requested discovery of names from the users' ISPs.

However, a judge in the Northern District of California found
this bulldozer process improper, and ordered that the case be put
on hold for all but one of the defendants.

Judge William Alsup ruled that because claims against the 12
defendants were unrelated, yoking the defendants together into one
big case was improper.

"Such joinder may be an attempt to circumvent the filing fees by
grouping defendants into arbitrarily-joined actions but it could
nonetheless appear improper under Rule 20," the order states.

The EFF has filed friend-of-the-court briefs objecting to
similar misjoinder in many of the cases filed by the Recording
Industry Association of America against alleged infringers.